It appears that Malayala Manorama has launched a mobile application that pulls vernacular news content via GPRS, for Nokia handsets. The application provides access to national and international news, including sports, travel, music, astrology and movies. The news content is refreshed every 30 minutes and works only with Nokia GPRS enabled handsets. A bunch of sites have posted a release that doesn’t make much sense - of a vernacular news portal and a “downloadable icon”.

Nokia has also announced an application that allows access to content in 10 vernacular languages - Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. The application apparently also has search, and mobile advertising for monetization.

For the media companies, this is just another means of distribution of their content…the same content.